American Progress | BRIdge from the Past: Art Across U.S. History

0:04 Hi everybody. Welcome to another episode of Bridge from the Past. Art across US history. In this series, we help you decipher historic visuals that help tell the stories of America’s past. I’m Mary Patterson, and today you’re in for a real treat because we have one of BRI’s real life teacher heroes all the way from Summit High School in Colorado, Mr.

0:26 Daniels. Mr. Daniels, thank you so much for being with us today. It’s super awesome to be a part of this. Thanks for including me, of course. So I’m excited because we are looking at a really great image today. This is an image that makes its way into nearly every US. History classroom. If you have a history textbook, I’m sure that it’s in there somewhere. It is American progress by the artist John Gast.

0:50 So here’s our image, American Progress by John Gast from 1872. Progress is an interesting term. So that’s something I’m going to kind of bookmark in the back of my head as we take a look at this image. When you show this to your kids, Mr. Daniels, what jumps out at them, or what do they ask you about?

1:11 Initially, when I used this American Progress image by John Gast in my class, one of the first things that students notice glaring off of the image that I’m showing them is the scantily clad female figure floating through the air. Yes, she is kind of scantily clad. That is very true.

1:31 She’s a floating lady. She’s a lot bigger than everywhere else in the painting. Who is that? What’s her deal? And who are all these little people underneath her, I think, is a question that I have. Any other questions that sort of frequently pop up in the classroom with you? One of the first questions that students tend to ask after they acknowledge the fact that we have this floating woman across the screen or excuse me,

1:54 across the image, bigger than everyone else is who is she? And they instantly want to get into an analysis of who that figure is. Right. And I think that it’s fair that you want to know, like, who is this and what is this supposed to mean? When you look at an image. But it’s important to take that first moment and just make observe, just take it in. What do you notice? This lady is pretty front and center, but there’s mountains in the background.

2:17 There’s definitely different landscapes. So what might they represent? So the more you look, the more questions that will come up. And, of course, questions hopefully lead you to seek out answers. So one of the things that I think is really cool about this image is that the artist is John Gast, but there was another man who was really the brains behind it, and his name was George Profit,

2:40 and he was a publisher of guidebooks for people Moving west. So this image is the masthead of one of his newspapers. So anybody says tourists, miners and settlers beyond the Mississippi. So he wants people to see this image. He asked the artist commissioned the image in 1872.

3:02 As he’s telling people about the list, he wants them to see this. And again in 1872 if you think of you are here in history. This is sort of an explosion after the Civil War of settlers moving beyond the Mississippi. And that’s not to say that people didn’t move west before the Civil War, but there’s new technologies.

3:26 You’re having a sort of railroad boom. This huge trauma of the Civil War is over. So you have lots of people going out west, so much so that by 1890, so not too long after this image published, the Census Bureau actually says, frontier is closed. There’s no more frontier, everybody. So there’s a lot of movement going on in this time period.

3:49 And I think that that’s important to keep in mind when you look at the image. So we have a little bit of context. We know a little bit about the man who commissioned John Gast to create this image. Now we can start, I think, trying to pick it apart with some analysis. Thanks for that introduction to the context.

4:10 In my classroom, I try to explain to students that contextualization is everything when approaching primary or secondary documents. And I love the term that you used in terms of movement. I would argue that this is an extreme time of rapid movement west in American history. I would say in my classroom that the United States westward expansion has taken off in a hurry.

4:33 We have technological advancements that aid the way we have acts such as the Homestead Act by the government that creates a situation where homesteaders can get land at a very valuable price. But then also there is a certain aspect of, well, wait a minute, this land wasn’t completely unoccupied, and what do we do with the people there?

4:53 And I always start with that concept at the beginning of my class before we break it down, as this tends to follow lessons on westward expansion generally. And I would get more specific with westward expansion as we would break down this image. So with that concept of movement, the United States starting off on the Eastern Seaboard and following

5:14 the Civil War, expanding rapidly into the Great Plains and the western mountains and beyond, I like to have my students think about this image in the realm of a map of the United States. And I try to have their eyes start off on the right side of the image, aka the East Coast, and then slide across from east to west into the left side

5:39 of the image, of which you can see some mountains. My students in Colorado instantly connect with that one because they know that that’s the Rockies. And from there, we just keep it simple. What do you see? I don’t want any analysis to start. I don’t want any guesses. I just want us to be literal about what we see.

6:00 Well, I see it looks like boats on the East Coast, and I see bridges, and I see two trains that are starting from the East Coast on the right side, and they’re making their way to the left. And that makes sense if we know that there’s a lot of railroads being built and people are moving west.

6:24 I have to say, I love that your students immediately identify the Rocky Mountains. I am coming from Virginia, where no Snow cow mountains, you just basically have little hills. So, yes, true mountains, true snow cow mountains are gorgeous and something that I hope everybody gets to see and go west. And I also see, as you said, everybody’s moving.

6:46 And the movement seems to be going to the left side of the screen. The guys, so there’s guys in the corner farming with oxen and a plow. And then you have a guy a little bit further left on the horseback, and it looks like he’s accompanied by men with tools. And then you have the wagon, Conestoga wagon behind them.

7:08 And then all the way on the left, I have looks like buffalo or bison. I’m never sure which to call them in the background. Bison. American bison. American bison. I see a herd of American bison making their way up, and they actually cut off. Where are they going? Are they falling into the ocean? And then I see Native Americans,

7:28 and it looks like a bear and maybe a wolf down in the corner as well. And overseeing all of this, of course, is the floating lady who seems to be holding a book, and she’s also holding it looks like a rope or a wire of some sort. So that tends to be one of the first bits of analysis that we deal with as we start to identify the various pieces of this painting titled American Progress.

7:53 We go back to the central figure, and I try to ask the students, what two items is she holding in her hand? Usually, we can do a zoom in and we can read the World’s Word school book in the item that is in her right hand. And I try to get kids then to think about, what does that symbolize? 90% of the time, the students without prompt understand that that represents education.

8:14 And then in her left hand, I try to ask students, what is that? And maybe we have to trace what’s in her left hand back towards the right side of the screen. And many students start to call that some sort of electricity cable. And I would argue, yes, that is an electricity cable also connected to the railroad, because communication and transportation were happening at the same time, and this represents technological advancements.

8:37 So then when we go deeper, okay, it starts off on this right side or the east of the image. She’s moving it through the Great Plains going towards west. And it seems to be that this figure is carrying with her not only education from a Western standpoint, but also technology.

9:00 Very interesting. So it’s almost like as she moves and as the people move with her, she’s bringing gifts. I’m using my air quotes application technology. So there are these links with the east where she’s commenting she’s sort of bringing the east with her in a way that makes sense.

9:20 Absolutely. And then from there, we go back to those individual items that you so kindly introduced to us at the start. Everything in terms of, like, the bottom righthand side of the homesteaders with their oxen and their plows to the wagons, to the miners and the hunters, even to the tone of the colors or

9:41 the shade of the colors within this image to represent lightness on the right side. And holy cow, it seems like this figure is moving towards the darkness on the left. So I want to briefly so the the miners, the men sort of right underneath our scantily clad lady that I guess that’s an allusion to sort of the earliest settlers going west.

10:03 You have the Gold Rush before in California, before the Civil War, and during the Civil War, you have the Homestead Act, which I think it was 160 acres, which is really hard for someone like East Coast to wrap their head around how much this vast expanse of land. So we’re talking about huge chunks of land where all these people are coming.

10:24 And you mentioned the light. It’s definitely lighter on the right side than it is on the east side. And again, these people, the American bison, these wild animals, and then the Native Americans, they’re kind of looking back at the light as they’re moving further left. One of the points that I make up, too, is that if you really look closely,

10:47 I would argue those are the only figures that are looking at this central figure. Yes. No, you’re right. That is very interesting. I never noticed that before. Students put me on that one. Every time I do this lesson, they show me something that was hidden the first time I saw it. That is the beauty of looking at an image with someone else because they always see something that you don’t see.

11:10 That is fascinating. I love that. And I’m actually going to take us back to George Crawford who put this image in his guidebook and he actually wrote a very brief description to accompany it and he ended it by saying that he’s talking about these Native Americans that are looking up at this Columbia, this representation of America and they’re

11:31 turning their faces as they flee this wondrous image. The star there’s a star on the lady’s head. The star of empire is too much for them. That’s what John Profit said about this image in 1872. I think that’s fascinating. And it’s so loaded. I guess is the way I would refer to it, that it’s too much for them.

11:55 And it kind of goes back to this idea of progress. Progress usually infers something that or implies something moving forward or improving in some way. But progress for whom or who is it benefiting or at what cost? I think these are all really interesting questions.

12:16 Those are amazing questions, Mary, that I love to toss out to my students as open ended questions that really don’t have a right, wrong, good or bad answer to allow them to think differently in the concept of a multiplicity of perspectives. And like you just mentioned, is progress really a quote-unquote good thing for all peoples involved, right?

12:41 And I think we should remember that when we’re talking about American history, there are so many different perspectives and viewpoints, and it’s really important to try to acknowledge them. It doesn’t necessarily mean you’re saying one is better, quote unquote than the other, but there is a multiplicity of perspectives that make up the American past, and I think that’s one

13:04 of the reasons why it’s so exciting and so rich and so fun to dive into. But we’re running out of time on our show today. So Mr. Daniels, thank you so much for being with us today. We hope you guys learned something. We hope you get to wrap your head around and go further with some of these big questions about progress and perspective and point of view and Western expansion.

13:26 So if you guys like this video, make sure that you subscribe to BRI’s channel. We put out new videos every Tuesday and Thursday, helping you with all things US. History. You can also find us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter and keep an eye out for exciting contests with really good prizes and talking cash prizes and programs and other ways to get involved.

13:48 We’d love to hear from you. We hope you’ll be back for another bridge from the past soon. And again, Mr. Daniels, thank you so much for being with us. Thank you so much for hosting me. I love doing work with BRI, and I hope to join you guys in this forum again in the not so distant future. That would be wonderful. So thanks again, Mr. Daniels. Thanks, everyone. Take care.